Cyclone VGT Dev Kit boards - some new boards failing to boot from NOR Flash

We just received 5 new boards from Terasic. 
Terminology:
"Rev B good boards" - these are Rev B, and work fine with our previous default release that has been stable since the start of the rev B release. 
"New marginal boards" - these only work with the "timing improved" rebuild of the Altera Max V bootloader code, but do not work with our previous default release. 
"Bad new boards" - these do not work with any of our custom Max V bootloaders, any edition. They also either do not work at all with the factory Max V binary, or will boot up eventually, just making it under the timeout limit of the factory bootloader (which seems to be about 6 seconds). These boards (when investigated) run dozens of "fail then retry" cycles. 

Of the five new ones we ordered from Terasic, four are the same as the "Rev B good boards". 
One is a "Bad new board" and will not boot even with the factory installed firmware. 

We will request an RMA/replacement for this one, and will do so for any more that we receive in the "Bad new board" state. 

For anyone receiving these boards, first run the quartus programmer and examine the Max V part (5M2210Z) to see what the checksum is. The factory max5.pof seems to be: Checksum 008D0C68, Usercode 008DOC49. 

See how long it takes to boot out of the box. If it's not instantaneous (say well under 100 ms?) then it's probably ok. If it takes seconds to boot, or turns on the red ERROR LED, I'd send it back for replacement. 

This is extremely frustrating and tedious.